Russia's authorities already take a draconian line against LGBT people, who face not only legal sanctions but violence and threats.

Russia's Supreme Court has issued a ban on the activities of the 'international LGBTQ movement' in the latest crackdown.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the issue of free speech on college campuses has received a new wave of scrutiny. Palestinian student groups have faced threats of censorship for their statements, donors have warned about pulling funding, and employers have blacklisted students who blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack.

But as far as free speech is concerned, 2023 has been a relatively normal year for colleges and universities. Just don’t confuse “normal” with “good.”

So far this year, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has received 1,312 submissions about possible free-speech violations. Compare that with 1,394 in 2022, 1,445 in 2021, and 1,526 in 2020. For 2023’s numbers to top those, the next five weeks would have to be unprecedented.

That’s not to say nothing has changed. There has been a troubling uptick in threats, vandalism, and assault directed at Jewish students in recent weeks. And efforts to shut down pro-Palestinian speech have intensified—including Florida ordering its state schools to ban Students for Justice in Palestine groups and Brandeis University actually doing it. (FIRE opposed both moves.)

Protecting free speech requires defending the rights of both sides of any conflict. That will only get harder if we ignore just how long colleges have been falling short. Today’s headlines can distract from the fact that campuses have been in crisis for the better part of a decade.

[Yascha Mounk: The real chill on campus]

Since 2000, FIRE has tracked incidents in which professors have been targeted for their speech. We’ve found that, until 2014, academics had little reason to self-censor, even when discussing the day’s most controversial topics. In the five years after 9/11, for example, more than a dozen professors faced calls to be fired, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned for statements they made about the attacks. These included Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who compared the World Trade Center victims to a Nazi war criminal, as well as the University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold, who told his class, “Anyone who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote.”

Only three ended up losing their job—including Churchill—each for reasons that went beyond protected speech. From 2014 to July of this year, by comparison, we’ve counted more than 1,000 campaigns to investigate or punish scholars for their views. About two-thirds of them succeeded, resulting in almost 200 firings and hundreds of other sanctions.

These numbers are almost certainly an underestimate. According to a national survey of nearly 1,500 faculty commissioned last year by FIRE, one in six professors reports having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and one in three said they’ve been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics.

This is what I, along with my co-author, Rikki Schlott, document in our new book, The Canceling of the American Mind. We found that the censorship people are alarmed by now is really business as usual. Cancel culture—which I define as campaigns to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is, or would be, protected by the First Amendment—has been pervasive for years, not weeks. The phenomenon kicked off in 2014 and ramped up starting in 2017, right as Gen Z, the first generation to grow up with social media, began entering higher education in massive numbers.

Some have described the recent sanctioning of pro-Palestinian advocacy as a “new McCarthyism.” But even McCarthyism didn’t seem to cause as much damage on campuses as we’ve seen in the past decade. According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties. We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200. In the late 1950s, when McCarthyism ended, only 9 percent of social scientists said they had toned down anything they had written because they were worried it might cause controversy.

Since then, self-censoring has grown even though legal protections for professors have improved. During McCarthyism, American jurisprudence had not yet established that the First Amendment prevented schools from firing professors for what they believed. In fact, the Supreme Court didn’t establish constitutional protections for academic freedom until 1957. Over the next two decades, Supreme Court precedents further strengthened academic freedom, free speech, and freedom of association for both students and professors. At public colleges—at the very least—professors cannot be fired because of their viewpoint, thanks to those precedents.

[From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind]

Still, last year’s FIRE survey found that 59 percent of professors are at least “somewhat likely” to self-censor in academic publications. With respect to publications, talks, interviews, or lectures directed to a general audience, that figure was 79 percent. And the problem continues to get worse: 38 percent of faculty said they were more likely to self-censor at the end of 2022 than they were in September 2020. A 2021 report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that a staggering 70 percent of right-leaning academics in the social sciences and humanities self-censor in their teaching or research.

It seems to me that the only major difference between the past few weeks and the past decade has to do with who is finally acknowledging the problem. People who once claimed that cancel culture doesn’t exist—or that it’s really just “accountability” or “consequence” culture—are lamenting the issue now that they agree with the group suffering the consequences.

Indeed, ideology plays an important role in how campus speech is treated. The specifics of each case vary significantly, but FIRE data show that pro-Palestinian speech has generally been more likely to trigger campaigns to get professors fired, investigated, or sanctioned than pro-Israel speech has. Campaigns targeting pro-Israel speech, however, have been more likely to succeed. Similarly, more attempts have been made to deplatform pro-Palestinian speeches on campus, but attempts against pro-Israel speakers have been more successful. In fact, all substantial and successful disruptions of campus speeches that FIRE has recorded on this issue have targeted pro-Israel advocacy. This might partly be explained by the fact that pro-Palestinian—and even pro-Hamas—sentiments are relatively common on campus and among college-aged Americans.

If we want to defeat cancel culture and preserve free speech and academic freedom on campus, we need to recognize it regardless of its victims. Those decrying today’s so-called new McCarthyism will have to acknowledge just how long it’s been going on—not only for the past 40 days, but for the past nine years.

It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation]

Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.

Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, had tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”

This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”

Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.

I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.

[From the June 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on how politics poisoned the evangelical church]

As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.

Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.

The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of Politico, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.

It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.

“You see all these people?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.

“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.

The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.

“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”

Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.

Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.

Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.

When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.

Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.

The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.

Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.

Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.

They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.

It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.

In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.

Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh ?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.

A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.

Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.

He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.

However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.

I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, once remarked that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. Evangelical soon became synonymous with conservative Christian, and eventually with white conservative Republican.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.

From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.

The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)

But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.

Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.

This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.

Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”

To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.

Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.

“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”

This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.

I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.

Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.

Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.

Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.

There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.

Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.

He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)

Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.And then Dad died.

Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church had become unruly; his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.

By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.

The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech the following year, long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”

That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.

“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”

For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.

“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”

This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.

The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.

I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?

I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.

We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”

Winans thought for a moment.

“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

This article was adapted from Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Church of America.”

Where to even start in cataloging the most ridiculous—and alarming—recent rulings to come out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit?

There’s a case about whether a class action could go forward that boiled down to a dispute among three Fifth Circuit judges over the meaning of a Bible verse. There’s a case in which the Fifth Circuit allowed three doctors to sue the FDA over a tweet intended to discourage ivermectin use that read, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” There’s a case in which the Fifth Circuit barred the Biden administration from requiring Navy SEALs to be vaccinated against COVID, because the court’s conception of religious liberty supersedes the military’s need for frontline troops to be healthy. There’s a case in which the Fifth Circuit held that the way Congress funds the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (a mechanism Congress has regularly used since America’s founding) is unconstitutional because Congress only imposed a limit on the appropriation, rather than putting a precise dollar figure on it. There’s the Fifth Circuit’s repeated insinuation that individual district judges, rather than the Biden administration, are better situated to supervise and direct federal immigration policy. There’s … you get the idea. When the hosts of the popular Strict Scrutiny podcast devoted an entire hour-long episode to flagging especially problematic Fifth Circuit rulings, they ran out of time.

The Fifth Circuit is the federal appeals court covering Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas (where I live), and it has in recent years become the place where just about every right-wing litigant who can brings lawsuits to test novel and extreme legal arguments. It’s not that a disproportionate percentage of major legal issues are arising in those three states; it’s that conservative and right-wing litigants are deliberately steering disputes to a handful of sympathetic district judges in Texas, from where they know that any appeal will go to the Fifth Circuit—whose judges are far more likely than others in the country to take their side.

A nationwide challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone? Filed in Amarillo. Nationwide challenges to the Biden administration’s immigration policies? Filed in Victoria. Elon Musk’s new (and laughably weak) lawsuit against Media Matters, which has no geographic connection to the Fifth Circuit whatsoever? Filed in Fort Worth. These aren’t exactly destinations for vacations, but they’re the typical destinations today for the lion’s share of litigation with an obvious rightward ideological or partisan tilt.

Back in April, David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic about the rise of “total politics”—where our political institutions have gravitated away from behaving with prudence in favor of scoring short-term political points. All that matters is #winning, long-term institutional consequences be damned.

[The decision that could end voting rights]

As alarming a development as that is in the context of the democratically elected branches (where voters could at least theoretically push back), it’s even worse when it comes from unelected judges—whose legitimacy depends on at least a loose public belief in their prudence. And especially when these rulings have consequences far outside the borders of its three states, the Fifth Circuit’s run of sweeping decisions undermines public faith in the federal judiciary nationally—not just from the eastern border of New Mexico to the western border of Alabama.

What the Fifth Circuit is doing is participating in an extraordinary power grab, indifferent to the procedural rules that are supposed to constrain the powers of unelected judges. For instance, the Fifth Circuit regularly holds that challengers to whom it is sympathetic have standing—the right to bring a suit—in contexts in which the Supreme Court has, for decades, held to the contrary.

The judges do this not because they have an unusually capacious approach to standing; they routinely reject the standing of plaintiffs to whom they are less sympathetic. Rather, they bend over backwards to take procedural shortcuts when they want to rule on the merits, such as in the challenges to the Biden administration’s proposed requirement that large employers require COVID vaccinations or regular tests. Even though the Fifth Circuit had only a 10 percent chance of winning the “inter-circuit lottery” that randomly assigns this type of dispute to a federal appeals court, it decided to jump the gun—issuing a premature decision, before the lottery took away its power, that the Biden rule was unlawful. (The Sixth Circuit, which “won” the lottery, quickly vacated the Fifth Circuit’s decision.)

Moreover, the Fifth Circuit’s approach to both constitutional and statutory interpretation reflects a rather wooden application of even the conservative methodologies championed by the current Supreme Court. Consider the court of appeals’ ruling in United States v. Rahimi, in which the panel struck down a federal law barring people subject to domestic-violence-related restraining orders from possessing firearms. Even though the federal government offered numerous examples of founding-era laws that restricted firearm possession by “dangerous” individuals, the court of appeals rejected that analogy—concluding that domestic-violence restraining orders were too specific a subcategory of danger for the comparison to hold. (In another bizarre procedural move, the court subsequently amended its analysis although no party asked it to—perhaps in response to some of the public criticisms that had emerged.)

The same cherry-picking of historical examples can be found in the CFPB case, in which the court of appeals either ignored or unpersuasively distinguished countless historical examples of similar congressional-funding statutes. When, at the recent Supreme Court oral argument in the case, Justice Samuel Alito tried to defend the Fifth Circuit’s efforts, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sarcastically conceded that, at the very least, none of those examples involved an agency with the same name.

[The Supreme Court’s extreme power grab]

The Fifth Circuit’s approach to statutory interpretation has been just as transparently results-oriented. One especially notorious example is the court’s conclusion that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission lacks the statutory power to promulgate rules for the temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel—at least in part because the court determined that the Atomic Energy Act didn’t clearly delegate such authority. But if the NRC isn’t authorized to provide for the temporary storage of nuclear waste, who is? (The court’s opinion doesn’t say.)

The upshot of these statutory holdings is not, as some of the court’s judges have insisted, to return power to Congress; it’s to frustrate federal regulation in general—because even a functioning Congress (to say nothing of the current one) would have neither the time nor the wherewithal to legislate with the amount of subject-matter specificity that the Fifth Circuit demands.

Throughout these decisions, the Fifth Circuit has shown a remarkable lack of regard for the Supreme Court—which not only keeps reversing it, but keeps granting emergency relief in cases in which the Fifth Circuit refused to do so, or vacating emergency relief that the Fifth Circuit agreed to provide. Take just three examples: After a federal judge blocked a controversial Texas law barring most content moderation by social-media providers, the Fifth Circuit unblocked it pending appeal, only to have the Supreme Court step in to put the law back on hold. Even though the Supreme Court’s intervention signaled that at least five justices were likely to side with the district court and conclude that the Texas law was unconstitutional, the Fifth Circuit went ahead and decided that the Texas law was kosher.

A similar story unfolded in the mifepristone case—where the Supreme Court issued a stay of Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s ruling (which would have massively limited nationwide access to the abortion pill), after the Fifth Circuit had refused to do so. Once again, the Supreme Court sent a pretty clear message that Kacsmaryk’s ruling was not likely to survive, but the Fifth Circuit affirmed it on the merits anyway. And just last month, the Fifth Circuit struck down the Biden administration’s rule limiting the distribution of “ghost guns,” even though the Supreme Court intervened twice earlier this summer to put the rule back into effect after the Fifth Circuit had blocked it. So far this term, the Supreme Court has granted emergency relief three times. Not only did all three of those cases come from the Fifth Circuit; in all three, the Fifth Circuit had gone the other way.

This disregard for the Supreme Court has the ironic effect of making the justices look more moderate. Last term, for example, the Supreme Court reversed the Fifth Circuit in seven of the nine cases it reviewed—the highest rate for any lower court in the country. A similar theme is likely to emerge from this term, in which as many as 20 percent of the cases the justices decide are likely to come from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and most are likely heading for reversal. The point is not that the Supreme Court is less ideologically extreme than its critics charge; it’s that the Court is less ideologically extreme than the Fifth Circuit. These days, that’s not saying all that much.

Even conservative scholars have started expressing alarm about these trends. In the November issue of the Harvard Law Review, the professors William Baude and Samuel Bray warned that “we have arrived, for the first time in our national history, at a state of affairs where almost every major presidential act is immediately frozen” by federal courts—most commonly in the Fifth Circuit—forcing the Supreme Court to step in at premature stages. In their words, “This is bad law and bad democracy. It cannot go on forever.”

[The care and feeding of Supreme Court justices]

But whereas conservative scholars have begun to raise concerns about these developments, the Supreme Court, which has not been shy about chastising misbehaving lower courts in the past, has thus far been mum. The lack of rebuke may explain why some Fifth Circuit judges are leaning into their newfound infamy. One of the court’s most visible judges, James Ho, regularly lectures law-school audiences about the importance of judicial “courage”—that judges shouldn’t shy away from unpopular opinions.

Ho’s not-so-subtle message is that criticism is actually evidence of good judicial rulings; in his world, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But whether this is what these judges truly believe or just how they think they need to behave in order to have any shot at a Supreme Court nomination in a future Republican presidency, the bottom line is the same: The Fifth Circuit is the bull in the rule-of-law china shop—and it seems remarkably indifferent to what happens to public faith in the judiciary when it keeps breaking things.

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff.

Jarkesy responded with what can be described only as chutzpah. He didn’t just contest the SEC’s ruling; he alleged that the SEC’s entire process against him was unconstitutional. Among other things, he asserted that Congress never had the authority to empower the SEC and that the SEC adjudicator who punished him was too independent from presidential control.

In May of last year, Jarkesy’s arguments were accepted by two judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2–1 decision, the court agreed with Jarkesy, all but ruling the SEC’s entire existence unconstitutional. The opinion was so extreme that Judge W. Eugene Davis, twice appointed by Republican presidents—and elevated to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan—dissented vigorously.

[Kimberly Wehle: The Supreme Court’s extreme power grab]

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation.

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic. Only twice in American history has the Supreme Court concluded that a delegation to an agency ran afoul of the Constitution—and both of those times, nearly 90 years ago, involved unusual statutes nothing like this one.

The SEC was created as an independent agency in 1934, after the financial crash of 1929, to thwart the sort of market manipulation that preceded the Great Depression; Congress has granted it additional powers over the years to continue protecting financial markets. Responding to catastrophes and guarding against market manipulation is exactly the kind of work that Congress should empower the executive branch to do. Requiring Congress to legislate in response to every new fraud some crook might dream up would not be a good use of its time. And there’s no reason to think that delegating authority to police markets runs afoul of the Constitution.

This was, of course, irrelevant to the conservative judges who heard Jarkesy’s appeal. The Fifth Circuit majority concluded that Congress acted “unconstitutionally” without “an intelligible principle” by letting the SEC choose where to bring its enforcement actions. But of course, statutes routinely leave prosecutors and other enforcement agencies the discretion over how to proceed in their cases, without raising delegation concerns. And for more than 75 years, the Supreme Court has recognized that other agencies can decide how to proceed in their policy-making activities—whether via case-by-case adjudications or general rule makings, for example—without even hinting at any delegation problems.

Jarkesy’s second claim—that the internal adjudicator who first heard his case held too much independence—is especially galling. These adjudicators should be independent; the alternative would be to put their regulatory powers at the political whim of whichever administration might be in charge. They have long enjoyed some protection from removal, in order to insulate them from threats of reprisal. The Supreme Court has always recognized the need to maintain the independence of internal agency adjudicators: Even the conservative Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who wrote an opinion nearly 100 years ago extolling the benefits of presidential control of all government officers, was careful to carve out exceptions for adjudicator independence. But, apparently, Taft is no longer conservative enough.

Underlying the Fifth Circuit’s ruling is a deep misunderstanding of American history. Of the three judges who decided the case, the two in the majority seem to believe that government regulation of any kind is somehow un-American. Their opinion invokes the opening language of the Constitution, “We the People,” and then cherry-picks quotes from the Framers to support a stifling vision of federal power. For instance, they cite James Madison for the proposition that unless we keep the government’s powers strictly separated among three different branches, we will inevitably fall into tyranny. But Madison goes on, in “Federalist No. 51,” to recognize that “some deviations … from the principle [of the separation of powers] must be admitted.” And Alexander Hamilton, in “Federalist No. 66,” goes further still, championing “partial intermixture.” Besides, both Madison and Hamilton were interested first and foremost in establishing a powerful national government. That is, after all, why they had participated in what the legal historian Michael Klarman has called the “Framers’ coup” to get rid of the Articles of Confederation.

The Fifth Circuit’s claim that regulation and the separation of powers are incompatible is not simply bad history; like much of the rest of originalist jurisprudence, it is selective history served up to justify a preferred political outcome. In fact, as voluminous scholarship has decisively established, regulation was pervasive in the early republic. Congress has always depended on expansive delegations to govern the country. Separation of powers was not understood to be a bar to effective government. Indeed, for the drafters and ratifiers of the Constitution, such separation was a pragmatic principle to ensure free and efficacious government. That is why, far from impeding delegations, Congress made creative use of the separation of powers—such as in the establishment of the Sinking Fund Commission, enacted by the very first Congress, which mixed representation from the three branches to ensure the stability of the federal debt.

The Fifth Circuit’s misuse of history is symptomatic of much of the originalism practiced by judges affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society, who now hold immense power across the federal judiciary. Originalism’s ideology was born in sin; recent scholarship has argued that originalism first emerged to defend segregation following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And, in any case, many conservative judges don’t even bother to make substantial originalist arguments anymore. A lazy hand-waving suffices instead. They sprinkle in a few historical quotations, refuse to engage seriously with historians’ findings, and then declare their right-wing policy preferences are dictated by the authority of history.

[Nicholas Bagley: The rise of the know-nothing judge]

Thus, Jarkesy’s challenge might succeed. Arguments like his have been rejected by federal courts many times already. But the federal judiciary has drastically changed in recent years, and the Supreme Court with it—opening the possibility of a new, friendly reception to these absurd legal claims. (The Court could also set aside these substantive questions and decide the case on other, more technical grounds.)

Were Jarkesy to win, he would help achieve what the conservative legal movement’s members have long dreamed of: the destruction of the New Deal. The SEC, Jarkesy’s target, is not just the most important regulator of the financial markets, it is also one of the crown jewels of the New Deal agencies. Republicans have had it in their crosshairs for nearly a century.

The consequences of Jarkesy’s success would be disastrous, especially for the American economy. The SEC enforces the basic rules that make stock markets work. Without it, stock issuers and dealers would lie—with disastrous results. One needs only to examine the rampant fraud, contagion, and meltdown in crypto markets last year to see what an unregulated securities market looks like.

More generally, if Congress cannot delegate to agencies, it cannot govern. Congress could never and has never written rules specific enough to anticipate all eventualities. This is why Congress delegated power to the SEC in the first place.  

Finally, and most dangerous, ending independence for internal agency adjudicators would undermine the rule of law. Without independence, adjudicators would be beholden to the politicians who oversee agencies. Unscrupulous presidents would use agencies to punish their opponents and reward their enemies. This would do more than turn regulators into political handmaidens; it would destabilize markets, stifle growth, and inevitably lead to financial crises.

Of course, if Republicans want to pursue this terrifying course, they can try. The country is still a democracy. The right way to abolish the SEC and undo the New Deal is to win a majority and pass a statute. But Americans like having functional financial markets and bringing fraudulent hedge-fund managers to justice—just as they like eating unspoiled food and using effective and safe medication. The “administrative state”—that is, government regulation to protect the public—is rightly popular, as Republican presidential candidates, to their chagrin, keep discovering.

But Jarkesy, a fringe figure using fringe arguments, is trying to do an end run around the democratic process and win in the Court what right-wing activists have failed to achieve at the ballot box. The Supreme Court should reject this antidemocratic ploy rather than accept the Fifth Circuit’s fake history.

The Supreme Court has a mixed record in cleaning up pollution in India's capital.

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.

This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?

Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.

From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.

Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.

The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition.

[David Leonhardt: The hard truth about immigration]

Robert F. Kennedy emerges as an unlikely hero in this telling. Although Kennedy was a committed supporter of civil rights, he recognized that Democrats were alienating their working-class base. As a primary candidate in 1968, he emphasized the need to restore “law and order” and took shots at the New Left, opposing draft exemptions for college students. As a result of these and other centrist stances, Kennedy was criticized by the liberal press—even as he won key primary victories on the strength of his support from both white and Black working-class voters.

But Kennedy was assassinated in June that year, and the political path he represented died with him. That November, Nixon, a Republican, narrowly won the White House. In the process, he reached the same conclusion that Kennedy had: The Democrats had lost touch with the working class, leaving millions of voters up for grabs. In the 1972 election, Nixon portrayed his opponent, George McGovern, as the candidate of the “three A’s”—acid, abortion, and amnesty (the latter referring to draft dodgers). He went after Democrats for being soft on crime and unpatriotic. On Election Day, he won the largest landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. For Leonhardt, that was the moment when the New Deal coalition shattered. From then on, as the Democratic Party continued to reflect the views of college graduates and professionals, it would lose more and more working-class voters.

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radically new economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.

According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)

Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”

Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes. At the same time, Reagan’s message tapped into genuine shortcomings with the economic status quo. The Johnson administration’s heavy spending had helped ignite inflation, and Nixon’s attempt at price controls had failed to quell it. The generous contracts won by auto unions made it hard for American manufacturers to compete with nonunionized Japanese ones. After a decade of pain, most Americans now favored cutting taxes. The public was ready for something different.

[Eric Posner: Milton Friedman was wrong]

They got it. The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”

Today, we seem to be living through another inflection point in American politics—one that in some ways resembles the ’60s and ’70s. Then and now, previously durable coalitions collapsed, new issues surged to the fore, and policies once considered radical became mainstream. Political leaders in both parties no longer feel the same need to bow at the altar of free markets and small government. But, also like the ’70s, the current moment is defined by a sense of unresolved contestation. Although many old ideas have lost their hold, they have yet to be replaced by a new economic consensus. The old order is crumbling, but a new one has yet to be born.

The Biden administration and its allies are trying to change that. Since taking office, President Joe Biden has pursued an ambitious policy agenda designed to transform the U.S. economy and taken overt shots at Reagan’s legacy. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden quipped in 2020. Yet an economic paradigm is only as strong as the political coalition that backs it. Unlike Nixon, Biden has not figured out how to cleave apart his opponents’ coalition. And unlike Reagan, he hasn’t hit upon the kind of grand political narrative needed to forge a new one. Current polling suggests that he may struggle to win reelection.

[Franklin Foer: The new Washington consensus]

Meanwhile, the Republican Party struggles to muster any coherent economic agenda. A handful of Republican senators, including J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, have embraced economic populism to some degree, but they remain a minority within their party.

The path out of our chaotic present to a new political-economic consensus is hard to imagine. But that has always been true of moments of transition. In the early ’70s, no one could have predicted that a combination of social upheaval, economic crisis, and political talent was about to usher in a brand-new economic era. Perhaps the same is true today. The Reagan revolution is never coming back. Neither is the New Deal order that came before it. Whatever comes next will be something new.  

While the Supreme Court has accepted Khan's bail application, it is uncertain whether the ex-PM will walk out of jail.

The right to vote free of racial discrimination was won by blood and sacrifice, those of both the soldiers who fought to preserve the Union and the enslaved and formerly enslaved, and inscribed in the Constitution as the Fifteenth Amendment, so that sacrifice would not be in vain. But that right is also very inconvenient for the modern Republican Party, which would like to be able to discriminate against Black voters without interference from the government.

Yesterday, a three-judge panel from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the law that made America a true democracy for all of its citizens, does not allow private parties to bring lawsuits challenging racial discrimination in voting, which is how the law has worked since it was passed. The decision would effectively outlaw most efforts to ensure that Americans are not denied the right to vote on the basis of race as the Fifteenth Amendment demands.

"It’s hard to overstate how important and detrimental this decision would be if allowed to stand: the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources," the election-law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his website. "If minority voters are going to continue to elect representatives of their choice, they are going to need private attorneys to bring those suits."

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act were made necessary by the long and ongoing history of political parties seeking to disenfranchise voters on the basis of race. Lawmakers, given free rein, will do their best to draw districts to their party’s advantage. When racially polarized voting is present, the temptation will be to engage in racial discrimination against a rival party's constituency. For example, if your party mostly relies on support from white voters, you might try to draw a district that minimizes the political power of Black voters, a practice called racial gerrymandering. This is what Democrats did in the aftermath of Reconstruction, and what Republicans are now accused of doing in Arkansas, the subject of this lawsuit, although not deliberately. The Voting Rights Act bans practices that have the purpose or effect of discriminating on the basis of race, a standard that prevents lawmakers from benefiting from discrimination as long as they can cover their tracks. During Arkansas’s 2021 redistricting process, the state chapter of the NAACP alleges, lawmakers there drew state-district lines that dilute Black voting strength.

[Kimberly Wehle: How the Court became a voting-rights foe]

The Constitution is supposed to forbid such discrimination, but that sounds simpler than it is. In practice, if you have enough judges or justices willing to find unconstitutional the laws adopted to enforce that right, or willing to rule in such a way that nullifies the ability of those laws to function, you can simply render the Fifteenth Amendment useless. This is what the Supreme Court did after Reconstruction, when Black people were still trying to assert their right to vote and the justices decided it was a right they could not or would not defend.

The majority’s reasoning is simple, if absurd. Although acknowledging that “Congress had ‘clearly intended’ all along to allow private enforcement,” it argues that the text does not say so explicitly, therefore Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent, and decades of practice are irrelevant. The fact that this would allow lawmakers to discriminate against their Black constituents without interference from pesky civil-rights groups is an innocent coincidence. This interpretation of the law was teed up for the judges by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas in another 2021 voting-rights case in which the conservative-dominated high court weakened prohibitions against voting discrimination.  

All of this is part of a long-standing campaign by the Republican Party to undo one of its greatest accomplishments, the Fifteenth Amendment. It is a cause that Chief Justice John Roberts has championed since he was a 20-something lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department. As chief justice, Roberts has eviscerated voting-rights protections time and time again, in keeping with an ideological belief that prohibitions on racial discrimination are themselves morally tantamount to racial discrimination.

[From the March 2021 issue: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread]

Until recently. In June, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh unexpectedly sided with the Court’s Democratic appointees in upholding a lower-court order forcing Alabama to stop discriminating against the state’s Black voters. Alabama originally defied this order, perhaps because it was so out of character with Roberts’s past jurisprudence. The state’s recalcitrance forced the Supreme Court to rebuke Alabama again and tell it to follow the law. Not having done so, after all, would have sanctioned broader defiance of the Court's power, making Alabama’s behavior a direct threat to the justices’ authority, something none of the justices will countenance.

The Arkansas case does not pose such a threat, and therefore it raises the question of whether, this time, Roberts and Kavanaugh will go along with such an obvious attempt to allow Republican lawmakers to violate the voting rights of their nonwhite constituents with near-impunity. The fate of the right to vote free of racial discrimination is in the hands of powerful conservative men who, like the justices at the twilight of Reconstruction, have never considered it all that significant.